Sunday, February 08, 2009

Imagine: How and why Microsoft should pervert the iPhone

Imagine we lived in an alternate reality where Apple didn't forbid applications that competed with its iPhone suite. Yes, I know it's hard. History was very different in that universe. Maybe Jobs achieved true spiritual enlightenment a few years back, and the alternative-Apple's board wasn't able to fire him.

In that reality, like here, former Palm geeks were fed up with Apple's PIM/PDA services and current BlackBerry users snorted their coffee when contemplating the iPhone ...

... What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

They'd bind more customers to Windows Live, which they could leverage to provide streaming music and video services (remember, in this alternate reality the iPhone is open to Apple's competitors). Maybe they start charging for a bundled streaming media and data store service and generate revenue there.

Microsoft's iPhone address book could be used to tie customers to their messaging solutions, from email to instant messaging

They'd make it very easy for customers to switch to Microsoft's phones since they'd have a simple data migration solution